Six-hundred people dressed in colored ponchos have aced their attempt to set a record for the largest human playing card.

The Oneida Indians say the record was set Saturday by 600 guests at the tribe's Turning Stone Resort Casino Event Center in central New York.

In an attempt to boost the country's low birth rate, the Taiwanese government has turned to a rather bizarre superstition, encouraging pregnant women to "share their luck" with others by distributing unused sanitary pads and tampons.

Tapping into the Taiwanese tradition, which dictates that "women can increase their chances of getting pregnant by obtaining unused maxi pads or tampons from pregnant woman to share their luck," according to the Taipei Times, Taipei's Department of Civil Affairs announced this week that it will be collecting pads and tampons from expectant moms until the end of the month. The Times reports that the donated items will distributed "to those who are in need" in August.

Turkey's highest court on Saturday allowed a Kurdish couple the right to name their daughter "Kurdistan", a word historically banned because it was considered seditious, local media said.

Turkish news agency Dogan said the appeals court overturned a lower court's decision to bar Yunus and Elif Toprak's from naming their daughter after the region Kurds consider to be their ethnic homeland.

The governor of an Indonesian province on Saturday said he had ordered his top staff to replace their female secretaries with men following a string of extra-marital affairs.

"I received inputs that many government office heads here are involved in extra-marital affairs with their female secretaries," Rusli Habibie, the governor of Gorontalo province on northern Sulawesi island told Agence France Presse.

Argentines are seeing red after being asked to eat fewer tomatoes.

The government asked consumers Friday to try to stay away from the beloved food for at least two months because of an expected shortage caused by seasonal reasons including crop rotations.

Brazil's Maracana football stadium, one of the sport's most hallowed and raucous grounds, has some new rules of etiquette -- remain seated during games and please wear a shirt.

Another bars the use of musical instruments such as drums or bamboo poles to wave flags.

A Russian state service in charge of safeguarding Kremlin communications is looking to purchase an array of old-fashioned typewriters to prevent leaks from computer hardware, sources said Thursday.

The throwback to the paper-strewn days of Soviet bureaucracy has reportedly been prompted by the publication of secret documents by anti-secrecy website WikiLeaks and the revelations leaked by former U.S. intelligence contractor Edward Snowden.

Textbooks that were being used in Indonesian elementary schools have been withdrawn after they were found to contain a story about an erotic encounter in a brothel, an official said Thursday.

Outraged parents in the conservative, Muslim-majority country complained their children were being exposed to "porn" after the discovery of the tale entitled "The Shepherd Boy and Wolf Mother".

Thai police say they have rescued about 90 famished cats that they believed had been headed to Vietnam. They declined to say what fate they had rescued the felines from, but cats are considered a delicacy in their intended destination.

Police Col. Sakchai Sadmaroeng said Thursday his men stopped a pickup truck at a checkpoint Thursday and found six plastic cages full of cats in northeastern Nakhon Phanom province. The driver was arrested and faces charges including animal cruelty and illegal transportation of animals.

A man who was allegedly certified as dead almost three years ago has won a race for mayor in the southern state of Oaxaca.

Leninguer Raymundo Carballido Morales won the election in the small town of San Agustin Amatengo by just 11 votes last Sunday as the candidate of a coalition of conservative and leftist parties.